Author of ‘The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy’ Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bio

Professor Peter Temin is an economic historian who currently serves as the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT. His most recent book ‘The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy’ (MIT Press, 2017) was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2017. In ‘The Vanishing Middle’ Peter Temin examines the causes and consequences of the United States becoming a nation of the rich and the poor, with increasingly few families in the middle and how this problem can begin to be addressed. In addition to ‘The Vanishing Middle Class’ Peter Temin has authored or co-authored fifteen further academic books, most recently ‘The World Economy between the World Wars’ (Oxford University Press, 2008) ‘The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It’ (Princeton University Press, 2013, with David Vines) ‘Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy’ (MIT Press, 2014, with David Vines.) His book ‘Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression?’ - which hypothesized that it was not primarily the actions of the Federal Reserve which turned a recession into the most far reaching slump in the modern economic period, but instead was an autonomous drop in demand – remains hugely influential. Peter Temin has previously served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, Head of the Economics Department at MIT, President of the Economic History Association and as a Guggenheim Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.